Happy Halloween

I have been experimenting with coloring images digitally. There's a bit of a learning curve involved...

Pencil drawing; color added with Gimp.

A Whale of a Tale

My latest venture in children's books, The Tale of Wally Whale, is finally available! It turned out to be a bit of a battle.

I decided to try out a new format, in which I stretch a single illustration across two facing pages - this is a popular format for children's books. Alas, I simply could not get Amazon's software to accept the paperback version of the manuscript. Either they simply cannot print it that way, or I did something wrong, but even with the friendly help of human operators at Amazon, I could not get the manuscript print-ready; I have no idea what went wrong.

This went on for weeks, and I eventually gave up. Looks like this one will only be available in electronic format!

EDIT, 23/7/2020: I decided to give it another go, and this time round managed to solve the technical problems. The book is finally available in a paperback format too.

Feeling sick to his stomach for no good reason, Wally has to travel all the way to the coral reef, to go ask the Sea Wizard for a cure... Ages 5 - 8.

Here's the free web version

If you enjoyed this story, please consider buying a copy on Amazon:

or make a donation of you choice by clicking the PayPal donate button in the panel on the right.

Random bits and pieces

I can't always just work for the market; I'd go crazy that way. I'm an artist, not a money making machine. And thus, in between, I make time for all manner of random things. Like a fun hobgoblin:

It's the evil hobgoblin from Hans Andersen's story The Snow Queen, with his magic mirror. I may just get it into my head to do a whole set of illustrations for the story, which is on eof my favorite Andersen tales.

A portrait sketch:

And some quick studies after Pieter Bruegel, the Elder, and artist whose work I have long admired:

In the meantime...

I have been rather busy, getting my latest children's book ready for publication. It's the first one with lots of color pictures, so there are all manner of technical considerations of which I knew little when I started out, so I am going through a rather steep learning curve, so I have little time for much else. But I did try to fit in some experimental bits and pieces and random sketches.

I now and then indulge in these rather relaxing and meditative pseudo-mosaics, done in ballpoint and colored pencil:

A botanical sketch:

A quick colored pencil sketch after Van Gogh:

And some experimental watercolors, after YouTube tutorials:

I hope to put final touches on the new book by the end of next week, but who knows - things always take much longer than planned!

Snowman

A fun little experiment in watercolor on cardboard, 15 x 21 cm:

Heads and cows and things

I have been rather busy drawing illustrations for the latest children's book I'm working on. In between, made time for the Instagram "100 heads" challenge. Here are #12 - 15:

And a selection of the illustrations. The mostly empty pages will be filled up a bit with text. That, at least, is the present plan. The thing has not quite come together yet; I may or may not make extensive changes:

More sketches and illustrations

A few more sketches for the Instagram "100 heads" challenge thing:

And some more illustrations for my latest children's book. Lots more still need to be done:

New experiments

I have been rather wildly experimenting with all manner of things. I am developing ideas for an illustrated children's story:

The first of the above is in acrylics on cardboard; the second in watercolor. I am more inclined toward watercolor. Other attempts with acrylics did not work out quite satisfactorily. Illustration is really a new thing for me, and it's a quite different skill set from "fine art" (i.e. stuff intended to be hung on a wall). Thus a little journey that is both fun and frustrating at the same time.

Two more in the #100heads Instagram challenge. Due to lack of time, these heads are going to have to be pretty sketchy:

Studies of cattle, as preparatory work for the illustrations - the story will feature a cow:

And in between the cattle, some studies after Hergé's Tintin books. No time studying Hergé's work is ever wasted!

My latest sideline, Chinese brush painting:

I can't get hold of real Chinese brushes around here, so I just used a pointy western one. But this is yet another steep learning curve. The style is not nearly as easy as it may look!

The Garden Gnome's Journey

After much delay and administrative horrors, my new children's book is finally available. Here are the front and back covers:

Buy on Amazon page!

Gnome Alert (3)

And yet another batch of illustrations for my upcoming children's story The Garden Gnome's Journey. This is the lot, I think; still have to do a cover picture in color. Barring any unexpected troubles, the book aught to be available soon.

My other book, a youth adventure novella titled The Ten Horns, is available here:

The Ten Horns